Puny March Voter Turnout Shows Need To Move City Elections To November

COMMENTARY

March 13, 1993|By TOM SANDER, Editorial Writer

Chronically low voter turnout in March city elections is not only a disgrace but a frightening threat to democratic ideals. To boost turnout dramatically, Florida lawmakers should order Broward city elections to coincide with the November general election.

Last November, nearly 90 percent of eligible Broward voters cast ballots. But in Tuesday`s city elections, turnout dipped to an average of 25 percent (9 percent in Coral Springs).

Something is terribly wrong. And that something is that voters are ``over- electioned.`` Still reeling from three elections over two months last fall and a fourth Tuesday, three out of four city voters stayed home.

Ideally, to maximize voter participation, all general elections -- city, county, state and federal -- should be held on a single day, currently the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November.

Fall elections will be a major pain for members of newspaper editorial boards like me and boards of Realtors, chambers of commerce and other endorsing groups who already strain to interview and evaluate dozens of candidates.

Nevertheless, November city elections will benefit most people:

-- With the lure of national, state and countywide candidates, a much larger and more representative voter turnout should be attracted, instead of the ``minority rules`` situation that now prevails. In turn, that could attract candidates who otherwise might not run.

-- Small, powerful and sometimes harmful political factions that now dominate many city elections could be overwhelmed by a high turnout.

-- City taxpayers could save hundreds of thousands of dollars in each city every year by deleting a separate election, while elections officials will be able to reduce their workload.

Naturally, critics of this idea will argue that some city candidates will get lost in the crowd running for president, Congress, governor, state Cabinet, Florida Legislature, state attorney, sheriff, property appraiser, public defender, clerk of circuit court, county commissioner, school board member and judge.

That may indeed be a problem, but a more important problem outweighs its harm: The need to boost voter turnout to protect the democratic ideal of ``majority rule.``

With such a low voter turnout in March, city election results can`t begin to be representative of the will of all the people. In reality, the ``will of the people`` on March 9 was not to vote at all.

In most cities, only a few hundred or a few thousand people vote in city elections, a fraction of those eligible. Many people who regularly vote in November elections commonly stay home in March.

The argument about a too-crowded ballot has some validity, but less so now that punch-card ballots are used in place of old-fashioned voting machines. Voters no longer have to bend way down to pull all the levers on a voting machine clogged with names. Instead, no more than three or four offices are listed on a single ballot page, so city candidates would be listed separately from those seeking other positions. Voters who care enough now to inform themselves about other candidates in November ought to be willing to make the extra effort for city candidates too.

Also, crowded ballots will occur only every two years when other candidates are running.

An eloquent defense of fall elections comes from Barry Warsch, an attorney just elected to the Group 1 Cooper City City Council seat.

Before the election, he wrote, ``If we`re serious about wanting people to vote, municipal elections should be in November, when people vote, not in March, when they don`t. It`s shameful that, four months after an election with the highest turnout in recent times, we`re having an election for municipal officeholders, the folks who really effect your life, and can expect barely 20 percent turnout.``

If lawmakers resist the November date due to the crowded-ballot argument, then why not move city elections to the uncrowded runoff primary election ballot in early October?

In Broward County, the March election date was set for all cities by a special local act of the Legislature. It will require another special local act to change. Local mayors and city commissioners, members of the Broward League of Municipalities, plus condo, homeowner, civic and political club leaders should begin lobbying lawmakers now for a local bill mandating a change to fall city elections, to protect the democratic ideal that the majority really should rule.